From the course: Leading like a Futurist

Understanding how to see futures

From the course: Leading like a Futurist

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Understanding how to see futures

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- It's no secret that we're living in a world that's more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous than ever before. There's even an acronym for it. It's called VUCA. Military strategists coined this phrase more than 20 years ago in reference to a Post-Cold War era of strategic challenges whose root causes are deeply intertwined. We can safely say the internet of things, cryptocurrency, and fake news were not on the radar when VUCA was first coined. This new VUCA world demands that we think differently about the challenges we're facing and where we're spending our energy. Our focus needs to shift from figuring out the answers to figuring out the right questions to ask. This is very different than how many of us have been taught to solve problems. Most of our schooling rewards solving problems that are knowable and measurable, where performance and accuracy are prized over ingenuity and creativity. This approach serves us well in a world of known knowns where we can access information, benchmarks, and the latest best practices to help us solve and act. But in a world of unknown unknowns, where many of us find ourselves today, which is fuzzy and complex, layered with ambiguity and fog, we need a different approach. Not only do we not know how to solve the problem, we often don't really know what the problem is. It's here we need an outward-facing mode of contextual scanning, exploring, questioning, hypothesis formation, experimentation, and learning. The ability to see the big picture, ask divergent questions, make sense of the patterns, and separate the signals from the noise are far more important than rushing to a finite answer to the wrong problem. This might take a little bit of unlearning and rewiring in order to see what's in plain sight, and how to make sense of it. But we can do it.

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